It’s a principle that has stood the test of thousands of years of practicing medicine. A principle that transcends politics and partisanship and cuts to the core of what medical providers do every day: provide. Help people.

In Kenya, desperate pregnant women and girls who lack access to safe medical care because of funding cuts under Trump’s global gag rule are turning to "curtain clinics” to terminate their pregnancies. Such clinics are run by people who aren’t nurses or doctors.

The fallout of Trump’s global gag rule is upon us. Not a single week passes in Kenya without devastating media reports documenting how patients are going without needed reproductive health care and medical intervention thanks to the U.S. policy restricting funds to international clinics that discuss pregnancy termination regardless of the circumstance. The global gag rule is forcing health providers to either ignore that challenge or lose desperately needed aid for other services.

Kenya's longest-established family planning clinic has lost 60 per cent of its budget for defying a Trump administration policy forbidding women's health providers from offering information or services related to abortion.

Family Health Options Kenya has been forced to close one of its 14 clinics and curtail services at others due to US funding cuts amounting to Sh200 million ($2 million), Washington-based National Public Radio (NPR) reported on Wednesday.

On January 23, 2017, President Trump signed an executive order that bans U.S. aid to any health organization in another country that provides abortions, advocates or makes referrals for the procedure.

The full impact of the order won't be felt until September. That's when the U.S. government fiscal year comes to an end. At that point, every international organization that does not comply with the order will be excluded from U.S. funding, says Marjorie Newman-Williams, president of Marie Stopes International-US, an organization that provides contraception and safe abortion in dozens of countries.

As advocates and researchers have seen, it is African women and girls who are suffering because of the United States’ interference with reproductive autonomy globally.

Just three days after his inauguration, President Donald Trump issued a memorandum to reinstate and expand the “global gag rule,” a Reagan-era, anti-abortion, foreign policy directive, with the backing of Vice President Mike Pence. Because of this policy, any nongovernmental organization (NGO) outside of the United States that provides abortion procedures, participates in pro-choice advocacy, supplies information about abortion, or offers referrals to abortion providers has been forced to choose between forfeiting U.S. foreign assistance funding or ceasing to provide the basic reproductive health services that its patients need.

The global gag rule, also known as the “Mexico City Policy,” goes beyond just blocking U.S. funding for critical reproductive health services. A Center for Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE) research report notes that this policy also restricts what groups receiving U.S. funds can do with money from all other sources; organizations must subject all their funds to the same restrictions or lose U.S. funding.

JOHANNESBURG — President Donald Trump’s dramatic expansion of a ban on U.S. funding to foreign organizations that promote or provide abortions has left impoverished women around the world without treatment for HIV, malaria and other diseases, health groups say, calling it “devastating” because Trump went where no administration had gone before.

Trump in his first working day in office revived the so-called global gag rule. He expanded on previous versions so that for the first time foreign NGOs that even discuss abortion as an option are barred not only from about $575 million in U.S. family planning funds but also an estimated $8.8 billion in U.S. global health aid. And they must certify that none of their non-U.S. funding goes for abortion-related activities.

In One Year, Trump Dismantled Reproductive Rights Around The World
Abortion rights advocates say the Trump administration, led by Vice President Mike Pence, is putting anti-abortion activists in influential roles.

By Laura Bassett
01/20/2018

NEW YORK― Women’s health clinics from Iowa to Kenya have been forced to close their doors. International nonprofits have lost the ability to provide birth control, HIV testing and fistula surgeries in the poorest communities around the world. Half a million U.S. teenagers no longer have access to sex education programs.

In a single year, President Donald Trump has already decimated reproductive rights and access to family planning in the U.S. and around the globe.

Foreign health groups cutting services after a White House decision on abortion funding

By Ike Swetlitz @ikeswetlitz
November 8, 2017

It’s been 10 years, but Melvine Ouyo remembers the girl well — a 15-year-old who came into the clinic on the verge of death. She was in shock, suffering from an infection developed after undergoing an unsafe abortion.

“They had to remove the whole uterus to be able to save the life of this girl,” Ouyo said.

Ouyo, 27 at the time, was a nurse-in-training. Now, she works at a sexual and reproductive health clinic in Nairobi, Kenya, which, for the past three years, has provided free health care — from family planning to malaria treatment — in one of the city’s poorest areas, run by an organization supported in part by money from the U.S. government.

That's how one Kenyan health clinic views President Donald Trump's ban on US federal funding for international groups that provide, support or discuss abortions. Critics call the policy the "global gag rule."

The US already prohibits the use of funds for foreign family planning centers that provide abortions. But the global gag rule goes one step further in that it restricts doctors or other health providers in these centers from even mentioning the word, "abortion," to their patients.

It was a rare occurrence on campus — speakers at the front of the room and none of the students in attendance touched their phone.

That was the scene Thursday night when the #Fight4HER campaign came to Ohio State to speak out against the Global Gag Rule instituted by President Donald Trump. The policy bars any foreign nongovernmental organizations that receive U.S. global health aid from discussing safe, legal abortion with their patients.

“A policy that is literally going to cost hundreds of thousands of lives directly or indirectly,” Lisa Shannon, a long-time advocate for women’s rights in Africa, said in an interview prior to the event. “It is a death warrant.”